Monday, December 21, 2009

It's really starting to look like a barn now, but there's still a few details left to done. First, I added the top to the silo. The silo is officially done!

Next, the barn needs a little trim.Here I'm adding the borders to the windows on the side of the barn.Here's the barn after adding borders to the barn doors and hayloft doors.

At this point, I set the barn aside and started to work on animals. This, Fluffy, is the first of two cows! To get the spots right, I traced the image on tracing paper, poked holes with a pin outlining the different colored areas, put it over the gingerbread cow, sprinkled some flour on top, so it marked where on the cow all of the sections should be.

The directions in my book had very little information about how, exactly, to make the animals. Basically, they said, "Slap a lot of icing on it in the appropriate colors." That's not a direct quote, but my paraphrase. So I looked really closely at the pictures in the book to figure out how they did it and I noticed that the sheep had a nice, bumpy texture to it. So I took some of the icing I still had and added more sugar to it to thicken it up more. The icing I had been using was much too syrupy to hold any texture. Then I applied it to the sheep with a star-shaped tip. Presto! Fluffy sheep! (It's a cousin, Fluffy! Go with it.)

Now that I had some thickened icing, I went ahead and added star-shaped trim to the roof line, the front of the roof's edges (and the back for that matter, but you can't see that in this photo), and along the corners of the barn. Very pretty. =)

Then it was back to making more animals. This time, the horses! I chose a light brown color for them and mixed up a small bit of icing for them.

Here are the animals, pretty much completed. Cute! =)

The book also had chickens, which I guess they considered too small for gingerbread. They suggested piping the icing directly onto parchment paper and waiting overnight for it to dry. And to make extras--in case some of them break later. Apparently, they are very fragile. I made a whopping 12 chickens, mostly because each one took all of about 10 seconds to make.

First I applied the white icing in the proper chicken shapes. After waiting a couple of hours for it to at least be partly dry, I added more icing on top to shape the wings, then added a red crown, yellow beak, and black eyes. The chickens are done, dude!

Are you going to double side the animals so they will stand up, or how are you going to make them stand on their own? I'm curious. Looks so cute with the white piping around everything on the barn. All really well done!Can't wait to see the finished product. Are you entering it in a local contest? OD